I am a little late with posting these as my nails needed a bit of polish break and I had house things to do which trumped gettin' ma nails did! Last week's challenge was "mosaic" and when I saw Cristine of Simply Nailogical's Youtube video on Stained Glass Nails, I knew this was what I wanted to attempt. Her nails turned out far better, but overall I really loved how this all came together and thought stained glass flowers were also a great way to welcome Spring!

I followed Cristine's video tutorial fairly closely, but saved some time by skipping a few steps. I started off by painting all nails with one coat of Essence - Black is Back* followed by another coat but working with only one nail at a time. Here is where I deviated from the video because I just did not want this process to take longer than it was already going to take! Instead of painting a second coat, waiting for it to dry, sketching out the design with acrylic paint on the nail and then placing the glitter on top, I FREEHAND placed the glitter where I thought it would work. YES, I took a bit of a risk here.

Using the second coat of black polish as my "glue", I started working fairly quickly by first placing the yellow glitter with a wax pencil. You can also use a toothpick. For flower petals, I alternated between red and pink glitter and outlined them with green glitter. For the sky, I used teal and dark blue glitter to fill in any remaining space. I applied one coat of top coat and waited for it to dry so that I could use black acrylic paint to draw defining lines between the different colours of glitter. This is what really gives those definitive stained glass shapes!

I applied two more coats of top coat until the surface of my nails was smooth to the touch. At almost 25 minutes per nail, I wasn't about to let this manicure chip on me or lose any of the glitter I had worked so hard to apply!

Check out Naomi (@bellezzabee) and Traci's (@drinkcitra) creations for this week and stay tuned for 26 more weeks of #BCDNails! Tag us if you feel like joining in!